(July 2) - The flap of the past few weeks over the freezing of settlement activity in the territories and the evacuation of scores of outposts should be seen as only a tactical squiggle in the Palestinian-Israeli confrontation.
Sooner or later, however, if Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat does clamp down on the terrorism and violence he himself initiated over nine months ago (which is still far from certain), Israel will finally have to come to grips with the insistent international demand for removal of many of the settlements. One of the ironies of such a situation is that it will occur during the premiership of Ariel Sharon, the architect and bulldozer behind a good part of the settlement drive during the past two and a half decades.
It is well to remember that the Jordanian - and Egyptian - occupied territories of former Mandatory Palestine fell into Israel's hands as a result of the Egyptian aggression of June 1967, in which Jordan's King Hussein gladly took part. Settlement of those territories began only several months later after the Arab League Khartoum Conference rejected any peace negotiations with Israel even in exchange for the return of those territories.
In the first decade following Khartoum, there were two approaches developed toward the settlement issue. One was motivated by messianic religious fervor which saw in the Israeli victory in June 1967 "the finger of God," whose intention was to restore those parts of the ancient homeland to Jewish sovereignty. (I personally never fathomed the theological argument of why an all-powerful Jewish deity needed the intervention of mere mortal settlers to carry out His purpose).
The other approach was motivated by perceptions of Israel's security needs, and found its main expression in the Allon Plan. The idea was to establish settlements in those parts of the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Sinai which Israel would keep in perpetuity, while the major part of the territories would eventually be returned to the Arabs in exchange for peace.
It is often forgotten today, but the majority of settlers across the pre-1967 Green Line were settled there under the aegis of Labor governments.
The most successful of those settlements, which are no longer called settlements, were the ring of mountaintop neighborhoods surrounding Jerusalem, from Ramot Allon through Ramat Eshkol, French Hill, Mount Scopus, Armon Hanatziv and Gilo, where about one third of Jerusalem's Jewish population resides today. Those mountaintops were the positions from which the Jordan Legion directed a massive artillery bombardment of Jewish Jerusalem in the first days of the Six Day War.
When Ariel Sharon became minister of agriculture in the first Begin government of 1977, he became the most effective patron of the religiously motivated Gush Emunim settlers. Without espousing their "finger of God" argument, Sharon has used them to further his strategic purpose of inundating the territories with enough settlements and settlers to make any future Palestinian independence there impossible.
A quarter of a century later it is clear that that strategy has failed. It failed primarily because the religious fanatics among the settlers put off a significant number of the secular and traditional majority from joining them. Even after the influx of a million new immigrants from the former Soviet Union and the emergence of "quality of life" secular settlers, the total number of settlers in the territories never managed to equal the annual natural increase of the indigenous Palestinian population.
My bet is that if and when the crunch comes, the military pragmatist in Sharon, the man who carried out with a vengeance Begin's orders to evacuate the settlements in Sinai, will also be willing to give up a significant number of smaller settlements in Judea and Samaria.
If Arafat, or a post-Arafat Palestinian leader, will not come up with a quid pro quo that is acceptable to Israel, that crunch will never come. But if a political situation does develop in which we have to seriously consider evacuating a large number of settlements and dividing control and sovereignty over the territories with a Palestinian entity, it would be well to consider basing it on a demand for a mutual population exchange.
There are close to a score or more Palestinian villages in crucially important security zones such as the Jordan Rift Valley, an enlarged Jerusalem Corridor, and along the narrow waist of the Coastal Plain, which would be a bone in Israel's throat if they were incorporated into Israel, as part of any future interim agreement.
Israel's acquiescence in the evacuation of many scores of settlements in order to make possible a reasonable measure of territorial contiguity between the different parts of a Palestinian entity should be made conditional on an exchange of populations with the evacuation of those Palestinian villages being traded off for abandoning those settlements.
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